We done cut the budget.....

This was actually posted on the door of a real Burger King in Detroit.

After you have finished groaning and shaking your head at the state of American education........

Amanda pointed out that the MANAGER must have posted this one.

Or.......Amanda is a SAG card holder (Screen Actors Guild). She can vote for the Oscars and all that, based on her stellar performance as the Praying Mantis in "Nine Months". Well, plus 20 years of stand-in work for a bunch of Oscar winners.

Amanda therefore is addicted to TMZ on Fox LA. TMZ is all papparazzi, all the time. Amanda also understands that TMZ stands for Thirty Mile Zone. SAG card holders get extra cash for travelling and working outside the TMZ....which is centered at Hollywood and Vine.

Really.

Anyway....before the Rose Bowl, a TMZ video crew.....who have no shame and are utterly heartless.....went to Lawry's Steakhouse for the traditional pre-game steak dinner for the USC football team.

University of Southern California is both really expensive, and very hard to get in to. University of Spoiled Children is us UCLA folks way of referring to them.....especially when we are losing to them.

My parents were both UCLA folk....but my Grandma was a USC girl. Well, woman.

Grandma Mary was an brand new Irish immigrant schoolteacher when her husband died of appendicitis after a botched operation by a drunken doctor. She had two kids under the age of eight and no family for 6,000 miles.

But, USC took her. Grandma enrolled in graduate school at USC at night, and rode the Red Trolley from Redondo Beach up through South Central to USC every night to get her Masters.....and became the first female school principal in the Los Angeles school system at White Point School next to Terminal Island.

So......I have this built-in admiration of USC.

Anyway, TMZ went to the Lawry's dinner with their cameras and asked each of the players during dinner:

"Who is Joe Biden?"

The answers would make you cringe. No one had any idea. Rapper. Shooting guard for the Cavaliers. Outside linebacker for Oakland.

Eventually TMZ came to the quarterback. "Who is Joe Biden?"

"Joe Biden? Hmmm. Joe. Biden. Dude.....Isn't he the Vice President?"

Cheers erupted all through Lawry's......At least one guy on the USC championship football team knew Joe Biden!

California is now strangled by a battle over out budget. We are short about $15 billion or so.....about a month's worth of payments to Blackwater, KPR, Halliburton and the other Iraqis. The money runs out in a couple of weeks and California issues IOU's instead of money. Our credit rating is therefore in the tank.....and every loan we have taken out as a state is right up there with a crack whore's Citibank monthly percentage.

Democrats want to raise taxes to pay for the unanticipated losses from real-estate and income taxes....and gasoline taxes and everything else caused by George Bush's recession/depression. The California Republicans have drunk the Grover Norquist Kool-Aid and refuse to raise any tax, anywhere, for whatever reason.

Arnold has his tiny little steroid-emaciated balls in a vise. Massive cuts are coming all across the board, regardless of who wins the budget showdown.

Arnold and the Republicans are punting off two things first: education and health care.

No downside there! Our educational and healthcare standards are already lower than Costa Rica's......

Stay tuned for managerial skills like those in the foto above in a restaurant, bank, tire store, computer repair shop near you.

Policies like this make job outsourcing to India look good. Or Costa Rica.

Dell now charges extra for warranty holders to talk to actual Americans. Stay tuned on that one.

We closed.

We out of meet.

My Spanish is pretty good.....and they speak English in Costa Rica.

Hey...and while we are at it:

Happy New Year, Senator Abel Maldonado!

How was Cabo on your jet?

Don't you have a place in Costa Rica yet?